Somewhere in time: utopia and the Return of Superman.(Critical essay)

Superman is one of the most durable icons of American popular culture, evidenced most recently by the release of Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006). The success of Superman texts depends in large part upon their ability to appeal to audience familiarity with the Man of Steel, a paragon of American values. It is this familiarity, coupled with the promise of moderate deviation in each text, that strongly informs the long-standing popularity of Superman. I argue that Superman Returns performs work consistent with the body of Superman texts that precedes it; the film uses intertextuality and self-reflexivity in order to express continuity with the past as well as the promise of change. In the end, the film, which can be read as both a vague remake of and sequel to Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, 1978), exploits a tension between the past, present, and future that Umberto Eco sees as instrumental to the appeal of Superman texts.

The film acknowledges the utopian promise inherent in the figure of Superman as well as a conservative investment in the present that circumvents the realization of utopia. More specifically, Superman Returns expresses a utopian longing from a childlike subjectivity that equally informs the production and consumption of the film. A utopian vision of the future and a nostalgic yearning for the past are conflated by the consumer of Superman texts, so that the pleasure in viewing Superman Returns reflects Superman's own longing for a futuristic past (the lost planet of Krypton) that is equally out of reach. Superman narratives therefore affirm an eternal present, keeping the past and future perpetually at bay. The consumption of these narratives achieves the same objectives. My argument here is that not only do Superman narratives maintain a present stasis, in which the past and future are equally "hazy" (to use Eco's descriptor), but that Superman as a commodity does so as well.

Narrative stasis is one of the primary characteristics of the typical superhero text, distinguished by the hero's preoccupation with his or her past. In fact, some of the most popular superheroes base their origin and ongoing careers as crime fighters on personal trauma. Young Bruce Wayne witnesses the murder of his parents and, vowing to wage a ceaseless war on all criminals, becomes the Batman in adulthood. Teenager Peter Parker refuses to stop a robbery and later, when the thief murders his Uncle Ben, dedicates his life to fighting crime as Spider-Man. Each time Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker don their costume they respond to a defining trauma from their past and, in fighting crime in the present, ritualistically relive and rewrite that original moment of trauma. Their crime fighting serves a strongly symbolic role for them; they invoke the trauma in order to contain and pacify it. Importantly, since they can never undo what has happened to them in the past, they are compelled to repeat their confrontation with trauma and must fight criminals in perpetuity.

Superman is interesting in this context, for, while he too is marked by a traumatic past (the destruction of his home planet at infancy), he cannot ritualistically redress this past by fighting criminals in hand-to-hand combat, as Batman and Spider-Man do. Superman generally protects people from apocalyptic threats that evoke the fate of Krypton. Importantly, this is the central concern of both Superman and Superman Returns. In each film Superman's climactic task is to save millions, even billions, of lives by thwarting geological catastrophes created by Lex Luthor. So while Superman does fight an individual criminal, that battle is projected onto a larger scale than typically seen in Batman or Spider-Man narratives. The stakes are higher because Superman's trauma, and personal loss, is greater. His catastrophic loss informs his intensely nostalgic construction of Krypton as utopian, a literal "no-place" that he never knew and can never return to. Superman has lost not only his parents but his entire native world, and his adventures often center on a recapitulation of that loss, with Earth standing in for Krypton.

Superman reconstructs and reconnects to his Kryptonian past in a variety of other ways, all of which reaffirm the fixed temporality of his narrative universe. In the comic books he does this most typically by visiting the bottled city of Kandor, a Kryptonian city that has been miniaturized and that Superman keeps in his Fortress of Solitude. Furthermore, in both the comic books and in the films under analysis here, Superman revives the past by actualizing his inherited Kryptonian values. In Superman and Superman Returns he creates a simulacrum of Krypton using crystals from his home planet placed in the rocket that carried him to Earth as a baby. It is here that he is instructed in the use of his powers by a recording of his father, Jot-El. Through this mediated contact with Krypton, Superman preserves a link to his past that informs his actions in the present. By maintaining a relationship with Krypton and by embodying Kryptonian values, Superman also offers himself as a utopian ideal for the people of Earth whom he protects. By virtue of this complex temporal matrix, Superman inhabits a static narrative world in which a utopian past and future are perennially at bay and the present remains in stasis. It is my contention that this stasis renders Superman mythic while gesturing toward the novelistic and enhances Eco's understanding of Superman as both mythic and novelistic.

According to Eco, myths feature heroes (such as Hercules) who have "immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny," whereas the novel is attractive to readers because of the "unpredictable nature of what will happen" (15). Superman, according to Eco, embodies characteristics of both. Superman narratives merge the eternal quality of myth with the narrative progression of the novel, producing an "immobile present." I agree with Eco's assessment but want to push it farther to understand how this combination of the mythic and novelistic results in the perpetual deferment of utopia. Superman must stave off apocalyptic threats, thereby protecting the status quo, and he must also not allow the realization of utopia, which is equally threatening to the status quo. Krypton remains attractive to Superman primarily because it resides in the past; Superman, as the embodiment of Krypton, is appealing to humans because he figuratively resides in the future. Because utopian visions are inherently critical (their articulation affirms that the present is nonutopian in contrast), they directly threaten the present. By identifying Superman as utopian and by virtue of the fact that Superman is utopian because of his Kryptonian heritage, utopia remains an ideal perpetually out of reach of ordinary people. Superman both confirms and contains utopian desires. Krypton, as a lost object from his past, does the same for Superman. In both cases, stasis is privileged because it preserves the present moment, which, in these narratives, is perpetually sustained.

The structure of Superman stories is key to this mediation of past, present, and future. Superman must simultaneously be a mythic archetype and a consumable "romantic" figure determined by the conventions of the modern novel. He must be immobilized and ahistorical; at the same time, because of the form by which his narratives are presented, he must develop and be historicized a la the novelistic protagonist. Yet, as Eco states, Superman (and, I would add, his alter ego, Clark Kent) ultimately resists significant development. Both Superman and Clark Kent can never change because they are fixed contrasts to one another. Superman is defined by what he is not, Clark Kent, and vice versa. The novelistic changes that occur in Superman narratives are usually superficial; the primary characteristics of Superman and Clark Kent never change. In the early 1970s, for example, Clark Kent became a television news anchor instead of a newspaper reporter. However, he preserved his persona as a bumbling coward, and Superman remained resolutely heroic.